Hello friends, welcome to Sunday Stories. Well, we’re into Lent now, my forehead being daubed with ash as I attempt to abstain from various low-key depravities. I’ll be baptised in the Dart around the end of Lent so this arising discipline is a good thing, though hounds moan in the belly of my castle. I feel strengthened by the restorative words below.
Many of you will remember these few lines taken from Psalm 51:
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Enable me to hear joy and gladness, so the bones you broke learn to praise.
Turn your face from my failings, and remove my grubby intent.
Forge in me a clean heart O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Don’t remove me from your presence or take the holy spirit away.
Let you be the one who opens my lips, and my mouth speak forth your praise.
*
So I’ve been thinking about the poet Ted Hughes and his relationship to Dartmoor. It was another late night at the desk when I recorded this, owls hooting across the lawn, River Dart rushing along, sonorous from my open window. Here’s one of my favourites of his poems, Last Load. It has (to me at least) dream-memories of my childhood in mid-seventies Devon. He’s as exultant as Dylan Thomas in the last few lines.
LAST LOAD
Baled hay out in a field
Five miles from home. Barometer falling.
A muffler of still cloud padding the stillness.
The day after day of blue scorch up to yesterday,
The heavens of dazzling iron, that seemed unalterable,
Hard now to remember.
Now, tractor bounding along lanes, among echoes,
The trailer bouncing, all its iron shouting
Under sag-heavy leaves
That seem ready to drip with stillness.
Cheek in the air alert for the first speck.
You feel sure the rain's already started---
But for the tractor's din you'd hear it hushing
In all the leaves. But still not one drop
On your face or arm. You can't believe it.
Then hoicking bales, as if at a contest. Leaping
On and off the tractor as at a rodeo.
Hurling the bales higher. The loader on top
Dodging like a monkey. The fifth layer full
Then a teetering sixth. Then for a seventh
A row down the middle. And if a bale topples
You feel you've lost those seconds forever.
Then roping it all tight, like a hard loaf.
Then fast as you dare, watching the sky
And watching the load, and feeling the air darken
With wet electricity,
The load foaming through leaves, and wallowing
Like a tug-boat meeting the open sea---
The tractor's front wheels rearing up, as you race,
And pawing the air. Then all hands
Pitching the bales off, in under a roof,
Anyhow, then back for the last load.
And now as you dash through the green light
You see between dark trees
On all the little emerald hills
The desperate loading, under the blue cloud.
Your sweat tracks through your dust, your shirt flaps chill,
And bales multiply out of each other
All down the shorn field ahead.
The faster you fling them up, the more there are of them---
Till suddenly the field's grey empty. It's finished.
And a tobacco reek breaks in your nostrils
As the rain begins
Softly and vertically silver, the whole sky softly
Falling into the stubble all round you
The trees shake out their masses, joyful,
Drinking the downpour.
The hills pearled, the whole distance drinking
And the earth-smell warm and thick as smoke
And you go, and over the whole land
Like singing heard across evening water
The tall loads are swaying towards their barns
Down the deep lanes.
